"Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell--keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.

"The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases."

KURT VONNEGUT told us when we talked to him this fall that he had a new book coming out in the spring called The Slaughterhouse Five which was about war. He was, he said, in the infantry in France during the Second World War. They were over-run in the Battle of the Bulge, and most of the men around him were either shot or blown up during the action. Vonnegut and 45,000 other allied soldiers were taken prisoner and put in jails all over Germany.

He was being kept in Dresden the day allied bombers came over with a huge incendiary bomb attack that started a fire storm which killed 135,000 people. Vonnegut survived because he was in a cool meatlocker under a slaughterhouse. It all provides the base for his war book; it also is probably the basis of a lot of his other thoughts.

He told us one other thing before we left. We said, "You're a fatalist; but you still believe in the dignity of man."

"Yeah," he said, "well, all kinds of things are going to happen to you that you have absolutely no way of controlling; but you can always say something that God didn't expect to hear."